13

DAY 2

HOST DAY 2

Michael Birchall (university of wolverhampton)

INTRODUCTION

This panel presents a range of perspectives focusing on new economic forms and how changing the way we work, consume and produce may offer alternatives and change the systems of control. Under the influence of globalization, information systems, and the changing roles of economic and political governance, has transformed advanced capital, producing new situations, where an increasing number of workers have become engaged in precarious labour. Post-Fordism expanded with the revolts of 1968 and the fiat strikes of the 1970s; immaterial labour began to constitute this hegemony for all forms of production, including material and agricultural labour. Paolo Virno describes a number of signs of post-Fordist capitalism that mark radical changes in developed nations production systems relation to labor in the last 40 years. He states that, “post-fordism has annulled or complicated the traditional marxist correlation between the workers labour time and the degree of his or her exploitation”1. As labour is de-materialized and the division of labour in industrial production erodes, capital not only occupies the working hours during which products or goods are produced, It absorbs all of the workers time, as well as their existence. This exploitation can be seen in the labour of cultural workers – curators, artists, architects, designers, musicians, actors. These workers have become experts at balancing intermittent bouts of barely profitable creative work with additional routine jobs in the creative and service industries. Therefore, as cultural workers, are we able to devise solutions to the problems associated with advanced capitalism? Can work itself be the answer, since it has already altered our lives so much. As Kathy Weeks describes: “Work is not only a site of exploitation, domination, and antagonism, but also where we might find the power to create alternatives on the basis of subordinated knowledges, resistant subjectivities and emergent models of organisation”2 .

During this period of perceived economic recovery – from what is arguably the largest economic crisis since the second world war – what new economic forms have emerged as alternatives to neoliberal and capitalist

infrastructures? Are cultural producers expected to contribute to this recovery, using entrepreneurial strategies favoured in the “big society”? Has it become conceivable during this period to imagine ourselves less dependent on conventional monetary systems, what are the alternatives to this? Are local, small scale operations the answer to the failings of multi-national corporations?

1.

2. Paulo Virno, A grammar of the multitude. 2004.

Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwar Imaginaries, 2004.

SPEAKER 1 CRITICAL REFERENTS 1

TITLE

Jaromil/Denis Roio (naba, milan) Enric Duran Girait & Raquel Benedicto

(cooperativa integral catalana) with Britt Jurgensen (homebaked community landtrust and co-operative bakery) Bitcoin: Hype or Reality? Scenarios to Come in Digital Innovation

SYNOPSIS

Bitcoin is a decentralized system of digital authentication that facilitates the circulation of value on the Internet without the presence of any intermediaries, a characteristic that has often gained it the definition of digital cash or crypto currency: its triple-signed blockchain of contracts is used to record payment transactions. Since the early 2011 until now what has driven Bitcoin to its present popularity is its deployment as a decentralized financial system for transactions. It may be claimed that Bitcoin is one of the few grass-roots projects that makes its participants rich, but it may be argued it does so also by money laundering. Overall it seems that we are witnessing the emergence of a disruptive innovation for payment systems, analogue to what VOIP is for the telecommunication industry. The goal of this keynote is to step back from the results that are immediately evident in Bitcoin’s emergence and analyze this technical discovery with technoetic lenses: using an open mind and avoiding economic analysis, we’d like to envision what we can expect to come that can benefit society.